Search Engine Strategies - Toronto

For the past two days, I was totally engrossed in Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto show. My hat goes off to this years conference organizers at Incisive truly came through and took all the negative criticism from the past couple of year and turned it around.

Change from the Toronto conference centre to the Sheraton Centre was by far the biggest improvement. No longer were attendees and speaker subjected to the dungeon like bottom floor of the convention centre, but instead were treated to a much warmer environment even if it was all virtually on the bottom floor as well. Perhaps it was just the lighting and the cushy carpeted floors, but it just worked better and there were not (or at least I couldn't find them) black holes where you cellphone wouldn't work.

As usual, the quality of speakers was fantastic as usual and Andrew Goodman who chaired this event did an excellent job developing the session topics. Grant many of the session were very basic, but there were a few sessions and frequently at least one panelist who took it to the next level.

One change I did notice this year was the background of the attendees. In past year there were many do it yourself business types at the event trying to figure out how to do SEO and PPC on their own. This time around there was the usual independent SEO consultants and some agency types, but many more people who were from medium to larger business who are the ones being tasked with implement SEO or paid search campaigns.

But no conference takes place with out a few criticisms. The biggest one I heard and agreed with was the location of one of the 3 session rooms. It was far way (about a 5 minute walk) from the may area. Attendees and/or speakers not paying attention to which room they needed to go to were frequently seen rushing to these rooms or getting there late. The distance from the main conference area to the speakers room had the same problem. While this was a inconvenience for most speakers, on the positive side this forced many of the speakers who usually disappear to the speakers room to remain in the conference area and opened up the lines of communication with all the attendees.

There are numerous blog posts and tweets on the session specifics so I would take up any more of your time, just simply search on SES Toronto for the blog post or #sesto in Twitter for more information

SMX Analytics

As I mentioned before starting on March 31, 2009 SMX will be holding its first SMX Analytics conference in Toronto Canada. At this time, I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be speaking at this event on March 31 during the "Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic" session.

This promises to be a great event and remember that eMetrics will be on at the same time in Toronto as well. Great chance to take in two different web analytic conferences.

The New Google Interface

In case you haven't noticed the change yet in Google you will. Starting last week Google started to rolling out the ability for individuals (who are logged into their Google account) to start customizing their search results and even commenting on them.

This is all handled through what is called the "Google Search Wikki". So now you have the ability to move specific results up or down and even delete them. On top of it, you can leave comments for the whole world to see next to the listing forever.


Now this might seem like a good idea and is part of what I mention in a previous post on why Search Ranking is going to become meaningless. So is that day here now? Is Google on the right track? Will it last?

Let's tackle these questions one at a time.
1. No the day of search ranking being meaningless isn't here yet. Despite the ability of users to customize their results, how many will. How many know they can even do it and why would they want to. Sure you might want to delete your competitor from your results, but then how would you know what they are up to?

2. Is Google on the right track? That's hard to say, the feature most certainly has a cool factor to it, but what happens if I accidentally delete a listing, how do I get back? How many users have to delete a listing or move it down in their results before Google adjusts the natural listing? Are listing now not susceptible to attack by larger competitors who can have all their staff delete specific listing? Of course for us SEO, we could use it to fake search results to show how good a job we did. Just kidding of course.

3. Will this last? I don't think this will be going away to soon, but I can't really see people jumping on board. How many of us search on the same topics time and time again that we would really want to customize are listings. There are a few subjects that I do conduct regular searches on when looking for new content. I personally would have preferred it, if Google would have simply allowed me to sort the results by publishing date.

The last option of adding comments, does seem like a good idea. Let's see I like what I found on the other end of the listing so I go back to the search again and write a favorable comment. Who has time for that. The site on the other end doesn't match what I want so I hit the back button immediately and add a nasty comment (somewhat likely). Now there are going to be hundreds if not thousands of comments next something I want click on, do I have the time to read all the nasty stuff people have left. Hmmmmm

So let's give it some time and lets see if it will last.

Getting SEO Right the First Time

After thinking about my session at PubCon yesterday and if we as a group of panelist (Mark Jackson, Lyndsay Walker Blahut, Aaron Wall, myself and our moderator Todd Friesen) had one thing we were trying to stress I cam up with the following. "Get in the project plan!"

Once you strip away the advice on how to and why you should use h1 tags, why writing good description meta tags and why using clean & valid XHTML is important, it really boiled down to you need to make the whole SEO process part of the project plan and part of everyone's deliverables.

You can't let the graphic designer get approval on a design that can't be marked-up in an SEO friendly way. Just the same as you can't let the html developer, the server management team or the back-end database programmers get away with it either.

So how do you do this, the answer is simple, but it is the execution that is hard. Step 1, get everyone educated on search engine optimization, how it works, the impact of different components on SEO and why it is important to your organization. Next make it part of each persons project deliverables. If their deliverable is not SEO compliant, then they haven't finished their job and need to go back and get it right. Of course, this means allowing enough time (budget if you are outsourcing it) for them to get it right. Just because it looks good or works from a technical point, doesn't mean it is. None SEO compliant feature must be treated as a web site bug and fixed on a high priority basis.

2 Minutes with Matt Cutts

At a evening networking event at PubCon I had the chance to chat with Matt Cutts about some rumors I was hearing about things under development at Google. He was able to proved a clear and precise answer. So here are my questions Matt's answers:

1. What's with the indexing of Flash, what works and doesn't work? Matt was able to confirm what I had hear from Adobe last month, but that Adobe wasn't 100% sure. Google is only capable of finding links within the Flash file and unraserized text.

2. Is Google working on OCR for graphics and imaged pdfs? Matt - Google is now successful (at least to the limits of OCR) processing PDFs that were converted to images (you can't select text in these), but they are not yet working on trying to apply OCR (optical character recognition) to page images. Matt mentioned, that he has asked out this and even suggested it to the team, but so far no traction with the Google development team.

We went on to discuss how even if they got this working, the issue of OCR and different typeface would pose a huge issue and be very open to major mistakes.

So for now as I always state in my presentation we are still left with the 3 things that search engines value for our SEO projects - "words, words and words"

SMX London - Day 1

We are just about to start day 2 here in London of SMX. Yesterday's turnout was about what I expected, but perhaps a bit smaller. However, organizers were pleased with the turnout.

From the people I chatted most were very familar with the concepts of SEO and PPC and appeared to be more focused on the advanced tracks.

My session with Offir Cohen, Richard Gregory and Kelly Gillease went very well with a small but attentive audience. Chris Sherman monerated this panel and did his excellent job.

Only complaint that I can have against this conference is the lack of free wireless Internet access. While the conference venue did offer it, it was at the steap cost of 5 pounds per hour or 20 pounds per day. As such, I was unaware of anyone who opted for the wireless.

I'll provide a more detailed summary once I'm back home in Toronto and before I head off to Las Vegas for PubCon next week.

Google Twins & How to be Number 1

Ever do some "Echo Surfing" (search your own name in Google or another search engine) only to find another person with the exact name. While finding a Google Twin may more common for some than others, what happens if that other you represents something you're not and has the potential to damage your reputation. What if a potential employer or client Googles your name and finds them instead and thinks you are them and there are some not nice things out there about them.

This is something that all of us and not just those of us who choose to be in the public eye (like myself) have to start addressing. Think your name is so unique, try Googling yourself with both the correct spelling and common misspellings of your name. I might be the only "Alan K'necht", but there is at least one other "Alan Knecht" out there.

Perhaps, these are some of the reasons that the Canada's National Post reporter Brianna Goldberg, decided to see what happened when she Googled herself and her subsequent drive to dominate the top 10 results for her name on Google.

Her journey to Google domination including quotes and advice from myself and another expert are contained in her article entitled "Google Twins: I want to be number 1" (http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=743136).

This article makes a great read and provides lots of useful information. Let's help show the world the power of links by adding the article to your Stumble Upon, Digg, etc. account or better yet, blog about it and link to it with the words "Google Twins"” in the link text.

SEM Canada - Early Bird Discount

Here is the heads up on the next conference I'm scheduled to speak at. I really got excited about this conference after meeting the organizer Laura Callow last week at SES Toronto. She is a warm and friendly person, who is giving this conference a truly personal touch. As well several many of the speakers at SEM Canada were in attendance here in Toronto. We share the excitement of another search engine conference here in Canada. During various discussions, we acknowledge that this will be a different type of conference and how we are all being challenged to deliver something new and exciting during our sessions. Conference organizers are now offering a early bird discount of $695 for the two day event valid until July 7th.

I must admit, that most of the following post was so well put by Jim Hedger, that with permission I have reposted with only a few minor adjustments and some trimming. Now the essences of Jim's post:

The organizers of the SEM Canada conference scheduled for the 4th and 5th of September in Calgary have secured an "A" list of speakers including myself (Alan K'necht), Jane Copland, Todd Friesen, Ken Jurina, Cindy Krum, Bill Slawski, and Richard Zwicky, SEM Canada is now working on filling the most important seats in the conference, the audience.

According to conference organizer Laura Callow, local interest from Calgary and Edmonton is booming with several large companies in two of Canada's most prosperous cities booking space for their staff. International attendance numbers, which are vital for the conference's success, remain a hurdle as ID requirements for international travel are confusing for some US residents and high fuel surcharges have increased the costs of traveling. To bolster local support and turn that support into hard cash, SEM Canada is organizing a Test-My-Site taster conference.

In order to promote sales, SEM Canada is offering readers an enormous discount on the early bird rate. Until July 7, registrants can purchase a full, all-inclusive 2-day pass for only $695, down from the original early bird rate of $895, similar to the discount already offered to SEOmoz Premier members.

From the standpoint of a business developer, attending SEM Canada makes financial sense. Those who participate in the SEM Canada conference are likely to find a larger pool of potential customers than those attending similar SES or SMX events. There are few search marketing conferences held in Canada and the event in Calgary is the only multi-day conference on search marketing in western Canada. With a stable resource based economy, western Canada is the only part of North America seeing sustained economic growth at this time. The business market in western Canada, while served by amazing local talent, is still wide-open for search marketers to enter. There simply aren't enough of us up here to satiate the growing need for effective search marketing.

SEM Canada will be a far more intimate show than SES San Jose or the SMX East conference scheduled for one month later in NYC, giving attendees a chance to meet and really get to know some of the most influential names in the industry. It will also be a successful show, at least from a biz-dev standpoint, for those who attend.

Organizer Laura Callow recently emailed all speakers with a personal message for anyone interested in attending SEM Canada. "Please also ask your subscribers to contact me personally via email to put their names down on our hotel discount list I will call them back after they email me, or they can call me on 403-714-6170. We like the personal touch. Well I do…" Let's hope the personal touch works. The SEM Canada conference could be highly beneficial to the entire search marketing industry.

So I hope to see you there.

SES Toronto 2008 Review

Well another SES Toronto has come and gone. This annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Toronto is the one annual conference here in Toronto that I look forward to each year. As mentioned previously, I spoke at this year's conference (4th year in a row) on the topic of Keyword Research along with Christine Churchill and Michelle Pruitt (from Microsoft) and Louis-Dominic Parizeau. Our session was moderated by Anne Kenndey. While I was impressed with the quality of speakers on the panel as well as virtually every session attended, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed with year's conference

The networking opportunities and chances for everyone (speakers and attendees) to mix and mingle with most speakers were on par with previous years. I personally got a chance to get together with the usual suspects of with Jim Hedger, Richard Zwicky, Ken Jurnia, Andrew Goodman, Greg Jarboe, and Lyndsay Walker. In addition, I also got to reconnect with Bryan Eisenberg who I hadn't seen or chatted with in about 7 years and finally meet in person Laura Callow (organizer of SEM Canada scheduled for September of this year).

I was especially impressed with Incisive's decision to include an Orion panel session purely dedicated to measuring success in Web 2.0 world and another session focused on the analytics aspect of search engine marketing. While the Orion session my not have been as technical as I wished, it more or less met the demands of most attendees. What I found most disappointing was the lack of vendors at the show. My best guess would be at most there were 12 booths with the biggest sponsor being the Yellow Pages. The small size of the Google and Microsoft booths reflects poorly on them and the respect they have for the Canadian market. SES Toronto until now was not only the premier search engine conference in Canada it was basically the only one (this year there will be SEM Canada in Calgary), so why didn't they have a bigger and more technical presence at the show?

Another disappointment over previous years was the attendees. I'm used to a mix of beginners and experienced SEO people. This year excluding the speakers, I ran into only a handful of people had any SEO or PPC experience from the attendees. During my session I asked how many of the audience had keyword research experience and only about 10% raised their hands. This compares to over 50% who raised their hands last year during the same session.
Several of us have an uneasy feeling that this may be the last SES Toronto for a while. Nothing can be confirmed, and while Incisive was selling booth space for next June's SES Toronto, there was no attempt to presell it to the attendees (no banners, no announcement unlike when Danny Sulivan ran the conference). Here's hoping I'm wrong.

I am next scheduled to speak at SEM Canada right after Labour Day in Calgary (more on this line up shortly), with any luck I'm hoping to speak at SES San Jose in August and perhaps at Danny Sulivan's SMX East in October.

SES Toronto 2008

Search Engines Strategies Toronto is back for its 5th year here in Toronto. This year's event will take place June 16 -18th.

For the fourth year in a row, I'll be speaking at this year's event (June 18th at 12:45). My topic for this year's conference address is "Keyword Research". This is the same topic as last year's address, but I promise to update my slides and give out some new information.

Joining me again on this year's panel is Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance. I've gotten to know Christine not only at SES, but at other search conferences throughout North America. She not only brings a big smile and sunny disposition to each presentation, but a wealth of knowledge and insight developed through years of hands on experiences.

SES Toronto, to my great delight is also increasing its focus on web analytics. Anyone who has ever attended one of my talks knows that I firmly believe that you can't do and SEO or SEM without sound analytics in place. That's why I'm thrilled to see June Li (Clickinsight) (June and I have teamed up before in Toronto to speak on the topic of Web Analytics) and Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now Inc.) two of the leading authorities on web analytics speaking at this year's conference.

So if you're only going to attend one search engine conference in Canada this year, make SES Toronto. As reminder to people in the US north east, Toronto isn't that far to travel and it is a very cosmopolitan place (the most multicultural city on the planet) with lots of fun activities and despite the recent increase in value of the Canadian dollar, it still is a relatively affordable place to travel to.

PubCon 2008

The dates for PubCon (http://www.pubcon.com) 2008 have just been announced. This years PubCon is happening November 11-14 and once again will be held in Las Vegas.

While the speakers list and agenda haven't been finalized, it looks highly likely that I'll be speaking during at least one session at the conference. If this year's conference is anything like last years conference it promises to be highly informative, a great networking opportunity and one great time.

So block off these dates and get ready to say hello to Vegas. One word of advice, don't plan on leaving early on the 14th. This has traditionally been the day of the big networking event and something you really don't want to miss.

As always as I know more, I'll post more on this event.

New SEM Conference

I know its been a while since I posted, and now I have a backlog of news items. So here is the first one.

A new Search Engine Marketing conference has been announced. The conference entitled SEM Canada (http://www.semcanada.org/) will take place in Calgary Alberta on September 4 and 5. At a cost of $895 Canadian for a two day event, this conference has a very attractive price tag.

The conference features some great speakers including Andy Beal, Christine Churchill, Todd Friesen, Ken Jurina, Richard Zwicky and of course myself. As it stands now (agenda hasn't been completely finalized), I'll be speaking at two sessions and moderating a 3rd.

For those who've never been to Western Canada this is a great excuse. The conference is on the Tuesday and Wednesday right after labour day, so I'd suggest flying out early and spending the weekend in mountains (i.e. Banff or Lake Louise) or head out to one of my favourite spots in Canada the Alberta Bad Lands especially Drumheller and Dinosaur Provincial Park.

More on this conference as I find out, but for now check out SEM Canada web site and think about registering.

Google's Market Share US

Overall the number of searches in the US in October increased 12 percent from September to 10.5 billion. Google's market share continued to increase to 58.5% or 6.1 billion searches during this period according to comScore.

Just remember that all searches are not created equal and these numbers include searches on such web properties as YouTube and other search engine web properties. What does this all mean? If the experts are right, then the US search market is destined to resemble the Canadian market where Google has well over 80% of all searches. In essence, Google is becoming a monopoly when it comes to search.

Here are the other major search engines' market shares for the US in October:

• Yahoo - 22.9%
  
• MSN - 9.7%
  
• Ask - 4.7%
  
• Time Warner (AOL) - 4.2%
  

To more information please see the Yahoo News article

Baidu SEO

One of the benefits of running my SEO Tools and Resources Directory is people are always sending me in suggestions of new SEO tools or Search Engine Optimization resources.

I personally review all submissions and decide on which items to added to my ever growing list. Unfortunately, most submissions are not up to my standards. I was however pleasantly surprised by todays submission.

Today's submission was for an on-line article about Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) and how SEO for Baidu is different then SEO for Google or the other major search engines. While the English used in this article is not perfect, the message and methodology is clear.

Key points of the article include the use of simplified Chinese as the character set, use of specific meta tags (once again in simplified Chinese) and use of domain names an hosting locations. Over the SEO techniques described are nothing that don't apply to other search engines, but the specific combinations of elements are a bit different.

So if you're interested in marketing your web site to China and want to be optimized for Baidu give this article a read www.baidupro.com

The Description Meta Tag

The description meta tag, is frequently overlooked by HTML coders and copy writers. Yet, the importance of this tag has never gone away.

Some of us in the SEO community feel it is an important element in the various search engine algorithms, while some others do not. According to Google "While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results." Yet, I've seen sites rankings improve in Google with a simple rewrite of the description meta tag. So who do you believe? That's up to you and regardless, the mere fact that in many instance it will be displayed in the search results to describe the page, make it an important sales message to improve click-through rates.

If the search engine is your new home page, you not only need effective page titles (the first line of a search result listing), but an effective description meta tag. This tag needs to be more then just loaded with keywords, it needs to be engaging, and convince the searcher (if they see this element) to click on your listing. After all, being number one in search results with an uninviting page title and description, won't get your site any traffic.

As a reminder, the format of the description meta tag is
<meta name="Description" content="informative description here">

This is why, my firm K'nechtology always stress the importance of this tag and has developed a specialty of writing effective description meta tags. Effective description meta tags must be part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

For more information on this subject, here is a link to a great article from Google on the subject matter (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/querystats?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knechtology.com%2F&hl=en).

Monitoring Search Engine Traffic

One of the advantages of speaking at conferences is the chance to meet and socialize with other conference speakers. Recently at SES Toronto, I had the opportunity to go out for dinner with some 40 plus of these people.

During the dinner I had the chance to chat with someone from Google who actually works on the algorithm and I was able to get some very detailed information o the algorithm that almost contradicted what he had he said during his conference address. To be more specific, I got him to clarify his statement about coding valid HTML and its impact on SEO efforts, more on that another day.

The score of the evening was a chat with Richard Zwicky of Enquisite (www.enquisite.com). During our chat, he mentioned a beta product that his company had launched that allows any web site to get extremely detailed search engine traffic information that typically exceeds anything from all the web analytic products on the marketing (including WebTrends, Site Catalyst, etc.).

So we swapped business cards, and the next day I was given a personal demo of the Enquisite tool. I was impressed and immediately following the conference I registered for the beta. Ever since my account was activated, I've been enjoying rich detailed information on how people are finding my web site.

Features include:

• Splitting paid from organic traffic;
• Exact search phrases;
• Data drilldown by country, region, city, search engine, paid vs. organic, search term or any combination of these elements;
• Frequency of searches;
• Which page of search results they had clicked on;

This tool is a must have for anyone doing search engine optimization or search engine marketing. If you're using Google Analytics or any other analytics tool that doesn't easily split paid from organic traffic, the value is even higher. The best news it's free. All you need to do is go to the Enquisite site (www.enquisite.com), register and typically within 24 hours your account will be activated and you'll be given a java script to add to the bottom of all your web pages. It's that simple.

Once the script is activated, you just need to do a tiny bit of configuration to define how you identified paid traffic and away you go. You can now easily and accurately extract valuable information from all your search traffic. With this information on hand you can use it to further enhance you SEO efforts or paid search campaigns.

Search Engine Strategies - Toronto

For the third year in a row, I'll be speaking at Search Engine Strategies Toronto. While the search engine conference will run for two days (June 12-13), I will be speaking in the morning of June 12.

Look for me at the session entitled "Keyword Research: Purpose, Tools, and Tactics".

I'll be giving this topic a bit of twist by not talking usual SEO stuff, but about how to harvest data from your own log files. In essence using web analytics in support of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Unfortunately, I'll only have 15 minutes to speak and I could easily devote several hours to this topic.

So if you're going to be in the Toronto area in June, keep this conference in mind. It is the only one of its kind to take place in Canada. If past experience is anything, it is well worth the cost of admission.

For more information visit the SES conference web site.

SEO and Baby Naming

Here is a great article from the Wall Street Journal on how important it is for you to rank high in Google for your name. The article goes on to talk about how people are even choosing baby names on how competitive their name (first name last name) is in Google.

What is interesting this is the same exercise that SEO professionals do before recommending specific keyword phrases to target for a business.

For more details see the article on the web site.

Keyword Spy - A new Tool in my SEM Toolbox

A friend just forwarded a great new search engine marketing tool to my attention. After just a few minutes of evaluating it in the free mode, I've added to my arsenal of search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO tools. The tool is Internet Spy (http://www.keywordspy.com).

This tool allows you to easily see how different keyword terms you've purchased are performing plus look up the keyword terms your competition is bidding on a well.

So far I've only tried the free version of Internet Spy and perhaps I'll dig into the old wallet to give the paid version a try. My first thoughts on looking at the costs are that it is a bit steep. At $19 USD for a single day, they may be pricing themselves a bit too high and when you look at an annual subscription price of $99 per month ($1,188 per year) they are a lot more expensive then paid SEM and SEO tools that I'm currently using.

So I'll stick with the free version for now, but I'll keep in mind the competitor's information that you can't anywhere else. So let me know if you decided to give the paid version a try. I'd love hear from you.